Mexico

Left behind

The left’s strange disarray

ONLY two years ago, Mexico’s centre-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) came within a couple of hundred thousand votes of winning the presidency. It was the party’s best result since its foundation two decades ago. Yet far from capitalising on this strength, the PRD seems to have lost much of its public appeal. When it held a much-trumpeted unofficial referendum on July 27th as part of its campaign against the government’s proposal to liberalise the state oil monopoly, the turnout was low.

The party’s problems stem from the refusal of its presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to accept that he was defeated in 2006, albeit narrowly. On the one hand, this has alienated many ordinary Mexicans. On the other, it has split his own party. An election for party president in March was annulled after months of wrangling.

The government’s timid plans to allow more private investment in oil, a nationalist totem, seemed to have given Mr López Obrador an issue with which to resurrect his career. The PRD forced the government to hold a lengthy public debate on the matter. It hoped that its referendum would sway this debate by delivering a decisive public rejection of change. More than 80% of those who voted duly rejected the government plan. But only 1.5m turned out in Mexico City and the nine other states where the referendum was held, which have a total population of 45m. The organisers had hoped for many more.

Even within the PRD, a moderate faction around Guadalupe Acosta, the party’s interim leader, believes in talking to other parties about energy reform, whereas Mr López Obrador has threatened civil disobedience over the issue. Insults are flying between the two factions. Some of the left’s own supporters are becoming weary at this disarray. Proceso, a newsweekly that has long given slavish backing to the party, recently ran a special section asking “Can the PRD be saved?”

What makes all this odder is that the party ought to be riding high. It controls five states and Mexico City, as well as being the second-biggest force in Congress. With economic growth slowing, and the government’s bloody war against drug traffickers going far from well, the PRD might normally expect to make big gains in a mid-term congressional election next year. Instead, it faces a drubbing.